Seven Children, A Dog, and a Guitar (revised)

The night my parents sat my sister and me down in our living room and explained to us that Mommy was going to have a baby, I imagined a baby doll waiting in the garage for us. I waited patiently, and then expectantly as they explained that soon we would have a little brother or sister. Neither of us spoke, and at the time I assumed Tara was waiting with diminishing patience, as I was, for one of them to go out to the car and bring in the baby. Of course, Tara was only three at the time, and once he arrived, it took her close to a year to even realize she had a brother. It is more probable she was watching Sesame Street in her head or pretending she was a puppy. I, on the other hand, remember a distinct feeling of confusion when I realized that not only was there no doll, we wouldn’t even get the baby for months.

Talk about a letdown.

When the call came from the hospital, and my baby-sitter informed me that I had a baby brother, I congratulated God on his listening skills. I was not-so-secretly praying for a brother, not being all that impressed with the sister I already had.

While my sister and I had much in common, we differed in the details. I could never understand why Tara insisted—despite all evidence to the contrary—that she was a dog. I slowly began to appreciate that, when life hand you a lemon, well, you just gotta get on all fours and pretend that lemons were dog food.

I, too, lived in a dream world, but my dream world took place on the mountaintops of Austria. “My name is Leisl,” I would announce. “Oh look, here is my sister Louisa.”

But Tara was having none of it. “I’m not playing. I’ll only play if I can be the dog.”

“Tara, the von Trapps did not have any dogs.”

“What about ‘when the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling bad…’” Tara sang.

“Then you simply remember your favorite things—and nobody’s favorite thing was a dog!"

“Then I’m not playing. I’m only playing if I’m the dog.”

“Unh! Why do you have to ruin everything? Just be Louisa for a little while!”

“Woof,” she said matter-of-factly before settling on the floor with her head on her paw to rest.

I sighed. My mom really did enjoy singing and playing the guitar, and I would often put on her dress clothes and mope around the house, pretending my father had given orders that under no circumstances were we to have play clothes. The lack of children in our family wasn’t really a problem, because we so obviously made up for what we lacked. It was only Tara’s insistence that she was a dog that was keeping the rest of the world from knowing it too.

“Woof,” Tara repeated stubbornly.

I stomped my foot impatiently. “The von Trapps did not have a dog; they had guitars, and fun uncles, and Nazis!”

I thought to myself, this wouldn’t be a problem if Brennan had wanted to the dog. Brennan had never seen The Sound of Music and so was resigned to the lowly role of Kurt, who had barely any lines. But Tara knew the lines and, more importantly, knew the songs. She knew exactly when to step back and let Leisl have her solos. Tara understood that Leisl was the oldest and sweetest and kindest and prettiest, and therefore the most important.

Louisa, on the other hand, was manipulative and liked to crawl into normal people’s bedrooms with whole jars of spiders in her hands. Tara was perfect for Louisa and if she couldn’t see that …

I tried again. “What if Louisa is a girl who thinks she’s a dog?”

Tara chewed on that. “Can I bark whenever I want?”

“I guess.”

“Can I have a solo?”

“What do you want to sing?”

“I don’t want to sing, I want to bark.”

It became clear that I was going to have to say so long, farewell, auf weiderhesen, good-bye to Leisl and her siblings. No one wants to play with me, I would moan to myself. I may as well be an orphan.

It’s a hard knock life.

Death Elevator

For as long as I can remember, I knew I wanted to go to college at the University of Iowa. When I was accepted, I eagerly signed up for freshmen orientation during the month of July.

My tour guide at orientation was a tall, wiry college student with frizzy brown hair. She had obviously spent many hours in the sun, but was more of a weathered brown than bronzed gold. Two pencils stuck out of her head, keeping her hair in a loose bun.

With a large group of other incoming freshmen, I stood outside the Iowa Memorial Union and listened as our tour guide pointed vaguely in the direction of Market Street.

“If you go up Market Street back to the dorms on the east side,” she said, “be careful of the hill. In the winter time, I’ve personally seen more than one person fall down the hill.” She said this with the significance one might give to witnessing a drive-by shooting.

I remember the comment because I’d already climbed up and down the hill several times that day. If I were a mountaineer or even a hiker, I probably would have enjoyed it. As it was, I was more of an indoor girl—shopping and reading were my two main hobbies. The temperature was hovering around 95 with 99% humidity, and I shrieked each time I saw my increasingly frizzy hair in the reflection of buildings as we passed by. I made a mental note to avoid that hill.

The following August, once I’d moved into Burge Hall, I quickly realized that to get to the English-Philosophy Building from the east-side dorms, you must go up and down that hill. As an English major, it was unavoidable.

The first week of classes, my roommate and I would arrive at our dorm at the same time, both huffing and puffing, “I … hate … (gasp) that (sputter) hill!”

After about one week, however, my body quickly adjusted to climbing up and down it several times a day. The trick was to bend over at the waist in a 90 degree angle to keep your equilibrium so you didn’t topple over backwards. Going down the hill was trickier because inertia and gravity tended to make your feet pound the pavement faster than you really wanted to go, and before you knew it, you were at the bottom of the hill barreling into the intersection with no way to stop. The hill became an adventure.

Around December, with the first snowstorm, that adventure became a little more life-threatening. After one night of sleet and decreasing temperatures, the ground was covered by a thin layer of ice.

My best friend Natalie and I were tromping our way to class one early Wednesday morning. We approached the top of the hill chatting and laughing about daily events, what happened the day before on General Hospital, where to hang the posters we had stolen from the video rental store the week before, and how the girl who lived next to me really needed to stop playing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”—I don’t care if her name was Caroline, enough was enough.

When we got the corner of Clinton and Market, all conversation ceased. Our steps became tentative and we both silently wondered how we were going to get down this hill without killing ourselves.

There was a small group of people gathered next to the parking ramp. “Um …” one girl said. “How do we get down?” We stared down the sidewalk to the bottom where the street lay waiting.

Next to us, a car drove by slowing, brake lights lit up. As the driver began going down the street, the tires locked, and the car began plummeting to the bottom of the hill. The brake lights flashed on and off, on and off, as the driver began pumping his brakes to gain some traction. We all watched in silence. Then the driver applied his horn as a warning as the car slid half a block and into the middle of the intersection. No other cars were around, and the driver straightened his wheel, applied some gas, and took off.

The small crowd at the top of the hill all released the breath we’d been holding in anticipation of an accident and turned back to the business at hand. “Well,” the first girl said, “here goes nothing.” She and her friend both began sliding down the hill. Encouraged by their progress, a handful of others followed.

Natalie and I looked at each other. I distinctly remember Nat shrugging at me and we both set off. Within two steps, we were holding tightly onto one another’s hand (if I go down, I’m taking you with me) and no longer picking our feet up, choosing instead to just hold as still as possible and hope gravity would deposit us safely.

All was going smoothly until someone called, “Erica!” At the sound of my name, I tried turning around to see who was calling me, upsetting Nat’s equilibrium in the process. Down she went!

She shrieked, and in the next second, down I went, shrieking all the way after her. She was still clinging onto my hand, and, like a game of Red Rover gone bad, we slid down the hill, Nat her on her back and me on my side, both of us shrieking the whole way.

It wasn’t long before we slammed into another girl who had been carefully edging her way the street. Like a chain reaction, down she went, sliding after us. It wasn’t long before she hit a boy—but he was ready. Observing our ascent, he had grabbed a tree on the side of the road and was holding on for dear life. His expression of utter disbelief as we slid by him is engrained in my memory until the day I die.

After about twenty feet of sliding, Natalie managed to get a grip on the ground beneath her and pulled us both to a stop. We were both nearly catatonic in the middle of the sidewalk on our backs, panting, rather like the little brother in A Christmas Story. I had an image of some bully jumping into the frame while we lay paralyzed, but was distracted when Nat seemed to find her voice.

“I … don’t … believe that just happened,” she finally croaked.

I had nothing to add to the conversation. Her remark pretty much summed up the situation.

After that experience, we decided we needed a new route to get to and from the EPB. The following day, we discovered behind our dorm, sitting parallel with the hill was a parking ramp. We could leave Burge by a back entrance, walk about 10 yards, and enter the parking ramp at street level. Then we could either walk down three flights of stairs or ride the elevator down three floors, and exit the parking ramp at street level, thereby omitting the hill completely.

It was brilliant, and we weren’t the only students who had discovered this.

The first time we tried this, our experience was less than what we’d hoped. We’d eliminated the hill, but traded it for a foul-smelling elevator with suspicious liquid puddles on the floor and fishy smudges smeared over the windows and buttons.

The alternative, however, was falling on your ass in front of dozens of students and flailing downwards half a block, so we made the best of it and quickly adapted, even forgetting what the conditions were like in the ’vator.

We were reminded again, when our friend Sara rode on it once with us.

“What the hell is that smell?” Sara shrieked when we entered.

“Oh, we’re pretty sure that’s the smell of death,” Natalie said cheerfully.

“Watch out for the plasma on the floor,” I added helpfully pointing at the puddle.

“The plasma?” Sara looked horrified.

“Well, we don’t know for sure that it’s plasma,” Natalie said hurriedly, to ease her mind.

“It just seems like the most logical conclusion, since we’re pretty sure someone had to have died in this elevator to make it smell like this.”

Sara shook her head and stuck out her hand to push the ground level button. “Wait!” Nat and I shouted in unison and she snatched her hand back in fright.

“Don’t ever,” Natalie said sternly, “ever touch anything in this elevator.”

“Do you want to get a herpe?” I cried. “Look around!! Does this place look sanitary?”

All three of us scrutinized the dirt-smudged windows, crumpled wrappers, and what looked like a mass of leaves leftover from autumn in the corner.

Finally, Sara said, “No. This place looks like where garbage comes to die.” She looked at me. “You’re wearing gloves. You push the button.”

I looked horrified. “I’m not ruining my gloves by touching that button. Forget it. Move out of the way.”

She moved and I deftly kicked the button with my boot. The elevator chugged to life and we slowly began to ascend. “I see that Taebo is really working out for you,” she said wryly.

“Your backpack is touching the wall,” Nat told her matter-of-factly. “You’ve definitely caught the plague now.”

Sara looked around the conditions surrounding her and then turned to face us. “Who’s idea was this? I hate you both. I’ll die before I ride this death elevator again.” The doors dinged open and she stomped out, narrowly missing a girl and her boyfriend waiting to get on.

Nat murmured to me under her breath, “Well, she’ll probably die anyway. Do you see that clump of … whatever it is on her arm? That will definitely get her, if her infected backpack doesn’t first.”

“This death elevator is nature’s answer to medical breakthroughs. Survival of the fittest,” I replied as I followed her out and we struggled to catch up with Sara.

From behind me, as the doors began to close, I could hear the boyfriend say to his girlfriend, “Gross! Don’t touch anything in here.” From the other direction, off in the distance, I could hear the descending shriek of another sacrifice to the hill.

Oh, the Places You'll Go

This is actually a reworking of a piece I originally posted in the summer of 2003.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go…

“Some books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested.”
--Francis Bacon

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."
--Scout Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

I am a book junkie. Just as I have to breathe, I have to read. My security blanket is not warm and fuzzy; it is square with rough edges and a shiny hard cover, but I sleep with it just the same. I rarely use my library card, preferring instead to hoard my money and spend my hard-earned cash on books, so after I am finished reading, I can keep them. One does not throw away their childhood stuffed animals; I cannot part with my books. Is there anything more delicious than picking up a brand new book, running your fingertips lovingly over the spine, feeling the coarse edges of the pages as you flip through them, and finally—after much internal fanfare—opening the front cover and hearing the satisfying split of the binding. The split that marks the initiation of the brand-new to the cherished. The split that allows the book to say to the world: Not only was I anticipated, paid for with hard-earned currency, and read, I was treasured.

Perhaps the only thing more delicious than a brand-new book is an old tattered, worn-out book. These are the books that show I don’t just see words on a page or even just pictures in my mind. I see a time in space and a space in time. I know where I was and what was happening in my life during the reading of these books. Each tattered copy marks not just a novel finished, but a landmark on my mind or—if I’m really lucky—in my life.

At the sight of my tattered copy of Little House on the Prairie, I recall curling up in a ball underneath piles of blankets while my dad read to my sister and me. I was so young that I didn’t understand a lot of the story, but I remember how the edge of the mattress would cut into my neck. I was unable to move—paralyzed with pleasure at the images the words were conjuring.

The scent of lilacs today reminds me of a warm spring at the end of eighth grade. I sat in our backyard as flowers bloomed and I sobbed over the ending to Sharon Creech’s poignant Walk Two Moons.

Whenever I see a Hemingway book today, I remember one Saturday night in my sophomore year in college. My roommate and I were taking a novels class, and instead of dressing up to go out with our friends, we curled up (she on our depressed-looking futon, and I on my lofted bed) with our copies of In Our Time. Every few pages we would pause to wait for the other to catch up or exclaim over what was happening. All of the stories were better because they were shared.

I was not allowed to watch television while I was growing up (a gift I will never be able to fully thank my mother for, despite the hours I spend in front of the TV now). From an early age I watched pictures in my head instead of on the screen. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is book that took me to a new time and space. I was not prepared for Narnia, the lion, the witch, or most especially, that wardrobe. The idea that one could escape into a different world from such an ordinary, mundane thing as a closet! Although the story has dissipated somewhat in my mind, the memories of wonder, awe, and plain and simple pleasure have evolved from feelings to moments of time and space inside me. For me, Narnia—or Alice’s Wonderland—or that Wrinkle in Time—is not found through a door in my closet, but inside a 6x8-inch square sitting on my bookshelf.

Miss Rixie's 2005-2006 School Year Goals: a Reflection

Please refer to the August 2005 blog to review the goals:

1. I will leave no child left behind ... except those who blatantly refuse to keep up by not doing their homework, yeah, they're so getting left behind. It's like those kids who won't get back in the car at the rest stop when Dad stops to go to the bathroom, and then he has to drive away to teach Kid a lesson so that it won't happen again. Well, I'll be the one teaching those idiots a lesson: You snooze, you lose ... but beyond that, I will leave no child left behind. Unless they really deserve it. Obviously. Okay, will leave a minimal amount of children behind.
Reflection: Okay, several children were left behind, mainly because they are too lazy to do their goddamn homework. Well, they weren't so much left behind as advised, then warned, and finally threatened that if they weren't waiting at the bus stop, not only was I leaving without them, I wasn't looking back. One kid's MOTHER actually said to me in May, "Why should he bother doing any more work because we're 95% sure he's going to flunk fourth quarter." In the words of Justin Timberlake, um, cry me a river. Hello, he still could have passed the SEMESTER. But he didn't do any work, so he didn't pass. And he wasn't the only one.


2. Will do a minimal amount of study guides and instead try to find a more engaging way to teach students.
Reflection: This was a fairly successful goal. Many reading strategies were done, but I tried to pick fun ones and didn't hear many complaints.

3. Will not allow Scary-Mary from next door to torment me by blazing in the door in all her glory to yell at students to keep noise down and glaring at me from behind her glasses only to mock-apologize the next hour. Will simply explain that I, unlike her, do not choose to teach by making my students keep their noses in their books five days a week without ever discussing what they're reading or doing activities to keep them engaged.
Reflection: Amazingly, Scary-Mary did not blaze in the door in all her glory even one single time this year. She did send a student in once, but it was minor. And, of course, now I'm moving rooms, so her reign of terror has come to an end. For me, anyway.

4. Will write a kickin' choral reading script for speech season beginning in November/December. My choral reading kids will not be subjected to Scary-Mary's "I am a better speech coach" attitude because they will be too caught up in what an awesome job they are doing putting it together.
Reflection: We did "How to Eat Like a Child" by Delia Ephron. And we kicked it!! I had a great group of kids and they had a great time!!

5. Make choral reading more of a student-led event. Instead of having me do everything (write script, figure out poses, etc.) will encourage the kids to figure out how they want to stand, what they want to do, how they will be grouped, etc. Yeah!!
Reflection: Didn't do any of the blocking by myself. At one point, when we were trying to set up a scene that looked like a classroom, I even said, "Help me!! I'm not sure what to do and I need your input!" and one of the kids came up with the inspired idea of having two students sit at the back of the "classroom" wearing Dunce caps. Brilliant!

6. Will not allow self to feel intimidated by scary/psycho members of staff such as scary gym teacher who looks me up and down and could be my grandfather (well, a really young grandfather anyway) and Bitchy-Brenda and Bragger Barb and, obviously, Scary-Mary. Will introduce self to new student teacher since I know how it feels to be a young woman on staff in a building full of middle-aged men who haven't been outside small town in last two decades.
Reflection: Wow!! Was just realizing at the end of the year, around April, or so, that I'm starting to know and feel comfortable--amazingly, like colleagues--with most members of the staff.

7. Be tougher when grading--make my students have to work for it. But also motivate them by doing kicking activities that stretch their critical thinking and application skills.
Reflection: Feel pretty good about this. Want to keep doing it. It's tough to remember in today's grade inflation world, that average means a C--not a B+ as most teachers seem inclined to give.

8. Will concentrate on reading skills and improving reading abilities in classroom by doing research, practicing different reading strategies with students, and generally, becoming Queen of the Reading Pool of Knowledge.
Reflection: Did lots of reading strategies that seemed to work, and built a reputation for myself. So much so that I am teaching a remedial readings strategy class next year. While I'm not the only one, I am the one my boss chose to have go with him while we were scoping out different programs, and I am the one that ultimately chose the program and designed the curriculum.

9. Will not allow self to get roped into doing things for other teachers such as stage or technical manager or director, etc. Will be strong and stick to my guns. Will be self-confident and self-assured. Mean what I say and support what I mean.
Reflection: Well, I got rid of the title "Speech Contest Manager" and refused to take on stage manager again. This may be the thing I am most proud of. Look at my little backbone growing!!

10. Will kick Iowa Standards and Benchmarks of Teaching in the ass, rock my Individual Career Development Plan into orbit, and make my Reading Strategies rule all. As Esme said, I will kick pedagogical ass.
Reflection: My portfolio of Iowa Standards and Benchmarks ruled all, but I still feel like I could use some improvement here. I hope that the reading class next year will actually improve reading scores. That is my number one goal as a teacher, and the reason I do everything I do.

In Reponse to...

In response to my sister's post entitled "The Day I Became My Sister ... or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Montage."

I long ago gave up the General Hospital video montages and have moved on to Jim and Pam from The Office. There are some pretty rocking video montages of Jim and Pam entitled things like "Just Once" played to some pretty rockin songs, like ones by Journey and Jessica Simpson. The cheese quotient is high, the longing looks are frequent. What's not to love?

P.S. There is a two hour The Office marathon tonight on NBC. Be there or be square.